BAUMGARTEN-CRUSIUS, LUDWIG FRIEDRICH OTTO: German theologian; b. at Merseburg
(56 m. s.s.e. of Magdeburg), Prussian Saxony,
July 31, 1788; d. at Jena May 31, 1843. He studied
theology and philology at Leipsic and became university preacher there in 1810; in 1812
extraordinary professor of theology at Jena, ordinary
professor, 1817. He gave lectures on all branches
of so-called theoretic theology except church history, especially New Testament exegesis, Biblical
theology, dogmatics, ethics, and history of doctrine.
Gentle and sympathetic, and shrinking from
theological strife, he was misunderstood in his time.
His exegesis was painstaking, free from prejudice,
and acute; as historian of dogma he understood
the origin and development of religious ideas and
doctrines as few others have done; and as systematic theologian he was profound and truly
evangelical. His principal works were: Einleitung in das Studium der Dogmatik
(Leipsic, 1820); Lehrbuch der christlichen Dogmengeschichte
(Jena, 1832); Compendium der christlichen Dogmengeschichte
(Leipsic, 1840), completed by K. A. Hase (1846);
Theologische Auslegung der johanneischen Schriften
(2 vols., Jena, 1843-45).

BAUR, FERDINAND CHRISTIAN, AND THE LATER TÜBINGEN SCHOOL.

The Period of the History of Dogma.
Baur's Early Life and Activity (§ 1).
Baur's Relation to Schleiermacher and Hegel (§ 2).

The Period of Biblical Criticism.
Historico-Critical Study of the New Testament (§ 1).
Applied to the Writings of Paul (§ 2).
The Fundamental Assumption of the School (§ 3).
Applied to the Gospels (§ 4).
Developed by Schwegler (§ 5).

The Period of Church History.
Political Complications (§ 1).
Baur's Works on Church History (§ 2).
His Theories and Conclusions (§ 3).
Their Weakness and Decline (§ 4).

The treatment of both Ferdinand Christian
Baur and the Later Tübingen School in the same
article is justified by the fact that the period of
distinctive theological and philosophical views
which characterized the school in its palmy days
really ceased with the death of its founder, or at
least lost the former local identification. Considering the Tübingen School in this strictly limited
sense, its history, together with that of Baur himself, may be divided into three periods--that of
preparation, or of the history of dogma, before 1835;
that of prosperity, or of Biblical criticism, 1835-1848; and that of disintegration, or of church
history, after the latter date.

I. The Period of the History of Dogma:

1. Baur's Early Life and Activity.

Baur
was born at Schmiden, near Cannstatt (4 m. n.e.
of Stuttgart), June 21, 1792; he died at Tübingen
Dec. 2, 1860. He was the son of a Württemberg
pastor and was educated first at Blaubeuren and
then (1809-14) at Tübingen. Here, besides following the usual thorough course in philology, he
was strongly attracted by the study of philosophy.
Fichte and Schelling were then at the height of their
influence; but that it did not draw the young
student away from the standpoint of the older
Tübingen School, in which he had been
brought up, may be seen from his first published
writing, a review of Kaiser's Biblische Theologie
in 1817, which condemned rationalistic caprice in the treatment of the
Old Testament. After a short employment as tutor in the Tübingen
seminary during the same year, he
was named professor in the lower
seminary which had grown out of his old school at
Blaubeuren. The nine years of his stay here were
active and happy ones. Though his work was mainly
philological and historical, he showed his interest
in the philosophical and theological movements
of the time. The doctrines of Schleiermacher
received his attention, and found an echo in his
three-volume work Symbolik und Mythologie
(Stuttgart, 1824-25). In this book, remarkable for its
time, he indicated his future course in the phrase,

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"Without philosophy, history seems to me dumb
and dead." The attention it attracted won Baur
a place in the theological faculty of Tübingen on
its reorganization (1826) after the death of his old
teacher Bengel. His impressive and inspiring
personality at once drew the young men to him,
and his influence in the faculty was contested only
by Dr. Steudel, the sole survivor of the old school
body.

2. Baur's Relation to Schleiermacher and Hegel.

The fact that in the course of his further intellectual development Baur gradually came into
conflict with the theology of Schleiermacher may be partly explained by
the difference in the mental constitutions of the two men. There was
no trace in Baur's method of the fusion
of sentiment and reason which characterized the other; only the intellectual side was allowed to be heard. His
strong point was his faculty of conceiving
historical phenomena objectively, amid the surroundings and from the standpoint of their
age. His relation to the philosophy of Hegel is
somewhat difficult to determine exactly; but it
may be safely asserted that his fundamental views
on the essence of religion and the course of history
were taken from the Hegelian system. The transition from Schleiermacher to Hegel was a gradual
process which took place between 1826 and 1835,
in the nine years which have been called the period
of preparation. It is probable that at first Baur
was unconscious of its extent, and it was not until
he applied the Hegelian principles to the canon
that they brought him into sharp conflict with
traditional orthodoxy. His Symbolik was logically
followed by his works on Manicheanism and
Gnosticism (Tübingen, 1831 and 1832)--phenomena lying on the border between theology and
philosophy, between Christianity and paganism.
In his tractate on the opposition between Roman
Catholicism and Protestantism, in answer to Möhler
(Tübingen, 1834), Hegelian terminology begins to
appear distinctly, though the foundation still rests
on Schleiermacher. The influence of the Hegelian
system on Baur was a very fructifying one. No
department of history had suffered more from the
leveling tendency of rationalism than the history
of dogma. Since Hegel had taught the application
of the iron rule of development to the phenomena
of the intellectual life as well as to other phenomena,
he pointed the way to a profounder understanding
of the beliefs which appeared frequently so haphazard and so arbitrary, to a knowledge of laws
which prevailed over individual will. Thus, when
Baur went on from the philosophy of religion to
Christian dogma, and in that to the most important
parts (the Atonement, Tübingen, 1838, the Trinity
and the Incarnation, 1841-43), he became a pioneer
of the history of dogma in the modern sense. Even
though the Hegelian categories proved a bed of Procrustes for Christian dogmas, and though the understanding of these suffered from the defects of the
Hegelian conception of religion, the impulse had
none the less been given to a profounder study.
More recent historians of dogma have felt themselves entitled to correct Baur's views, as set forth
in the above-mentioned works, in almost every
point; but these views had won him, by the end
of this first period, a prominent place in the ranks
of those who were trying to strike out new lines in
the study of Christian history; and when Schleiermacher's chair at Berlin was vacant in 1834, the
Prussian minister Altenstein thought for a time
of appointing Baur to it.

II. The Period of Biblical Criticism

The second
period, however, is the one which comes to mind
when the Tübingen School is mentioned. Though
certain books already named are of later date, the
period may be properly begun with 1835, in which
year Strauss's Leben Jesu drew general attention to
the questions to which Baur was already inclined to
turn. The application to the canon of Scripture
of the Hegelian laws of historical development
was peculiarly appropriate to the place in which
Baur carried on his work, since the distinguishing
mark of the older Tübingen School had been a
Biblical supernaturalism, for which dogma was
nothing more than the teachings of Scripture,
arrived at by means of exegesis. He felt himself
driven to a consideration of this question by the
need of a settlement with the school from which
he had sprung and with his own past; by his studies
in the history of dogma, since the source of dogma,
in the last resort, unless it is a mere collection of
irresponsible opinions, is the Bible; and by his
investigation of Gnosticism, which could not fail
to raise the question of the canon.

1. Historico-Critical Study of the New Testament.

In 1835 appeared (at Stuttgart and Tübingen)
Baur's work on the Pastoral Epistles. According
to his own account of this and of his article on the
Corinthian parties (TZT, 1831), it was his lectures on
the Epistle to the Corinthians which first opened up
the vista of more far-reaching historico-critical
investigation into the controversies of the apostolic
age, and led him to follow out, by means of New
Testament and patristic studies, his independent
conception of the clash of heterogeneous elements
in the apostolic and subapostolic days, their
parties and tendencies, their conflicts and compromises--to demonstrate the growth of a catholic
Church as nothing but the result of a previous
historical process. Dealing with Schleiermacher's
treatment of I Timothy, he considered the three pastoral epistles from the
same historical standpoint, and defined
the task of New Testament criticism
by asserting that the origin of such writings (as to the authenticity of
which more evidence was needed
than the accepted name of an author on their face
and a vague, uncertain, and late tradition) could
only be explained by a complete view of the whole
range of historical circumstances in which, according to definite data, they were to be placed. With
this character of historic objectivity, the new
criticism, which naturally could not but seem
merely negative and destructive in contrast with
the unfounded assumptions that it controverted,
intended to meet the arbitrary subjectivity of the
hypotheses which had, up to that time, played
so large a part in New Testament criticism. The
above statement, substantially in Baur's own

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words, expresses fully the guiding principle of the
Tübingen School. In the name of fidelity to fact,
Baur was conducting a regular siege of the fortifications which had been thrown up by his own
predecessors around the Christian doctrines, when
Strauss's assault upon the central bastion attracted
general attention. It was not without value to him
as a diversion, under cover of which he was able
to pursue undisturbed for a while longer his critical
work. During the next decade the Tübingen School
acquired an importance which seemed to threaten
the foundations of dogma from a new quarter,
relentlessly contrasting the accepted image of Christ,
as drawn according to the subjective Christian mind
by Schleiermacher, with the results of objective
historical criticism. The main part of the task
seemed to be left to Baur himself; he was not so
fortunate as the leaders of the old Tübingen School,
who had their allies in the other theological chairs.
On the other hand, he had with him a large number
of young and enthusiastic disciples, such as the talented Eduard Zeller, later his son-in-law, the still
bolder and braver Schwegler, Köstlin and Planck,
Ritschl and Hilgenfeld, the last two the most prominent
allies who came from outside of Württemberg.

2. Applied to the Writings of Paul.

Baur had begun his critical work with Paul,
and the same apostle engaged the attention of the
school in its later publications. Searching investigations of the Epistle to the Romans appeared in
the TZT in 1836, and aroused alarm and opposition. These, together with considerable material which he had published in the Theologische Jahrbücher, begun in 1842 by
Zeller and edited from 1847 to 1857 by himself and Zeller jointly,
which became the organ of the new school, he put
together in 1845 (Stuttgart) into a monograph on
Paul. The result reached by this part of his work
was the denial of the authenticity of all the letters
passing under the apostle's name, except Galatians,
I and II Corinthians, and Romans, of which last
also the two concluding chapters were questioned.
Finally, in agreement with Schneckenburger but
still more radically, the postapostolic origin of the
Acts was asserted. It was not difficult to conjecture what would happen to the Gospels when they
were thrown into the same crucible.

3. The Fundamental Assumption of the School.

The theory of the "objective criticism," as it
developed, was that the older apostles, with their
original body of disciples, were differentiated from
the other Jews only by their belief that the crucified Jesus was the Messiah. All the elements of a
new religion contained in his life and teaching were forgotten, or lay undeveloped in the
apostles' memory, though a Stephen attempted to enforce them and sealed
his testimony by his death. When Paul, by a wonderful divination, by
a train of reasoning from the cross and the resurrection, rediscovered
these elements of universality and freedom, the
Church stood suspiciously aloof. The older apostles, indeed, with a liberality difficult to understand in the premises, accepted Paul as an equal fellow laborer and admitted his right to the mission
to the Gentiles. But a section of the Church remained obstinately hostile. Paul appears, therefore, constantly prepared for combat, and when an epistle presents him in any other mood, it is ipso facto unauthentic. In view of these facts, it became all the more necessary for the next age to emphasize
the unity of the Church; when, accordingly, there
is perceived a conciliatory tone in an epistle, when
it speaks much of the Church and its unity of belief,
no further mark of a postapostolic origin is needed.
The school believed itself able to prove from the
Apocalypse, considered as a product not merely
of Judaic narrowness but of positive opposition to
Paulinism, and still more from the pseudo-Clementine homilies, that no accommodation took place
in the apostles' lifetime.

4. Applied to the Gospels.

These views, for all their possible usefulness as
against an exaggerated notion in the opposite direction, still left one question unanswered–what
really was the Christianity of Christ? This led
inevitably to the question, burning since Strauss,
of the status of the Gospels; but it was nearly
ten years before Baur brought his disciples to that.
In the Jahrbuch for 1844 he attempted to use his
critical principles to disprove the authenticity of
the Gospel of John. This treatment he supplemented by further investigations on the canonical
gospels, and published the whole result in substantive form in 1847 (Tübingen).
In a certain sense it was favorable to the traditional view. The order
of the canon was approximately that of their composition. Matthew,
in whom the Judaic tendency is strongest, would
then be nearest to the source; Mark would show a
tendency to accommodation and minimizing of
differences; and this would show all the more
clearly the Pauline tendency of Luke. The fourth
Gospel, finally, was supposed to display in every
feature the tendency to sink these differences in a
higher unity, and to take a stand for the conflicts
of the second century, Gnosticism, Montanism,
and the nascent Trinitarian controversy. This
work of Baur's marks the close of the great period
of the school. His disciples were now ready to
come to his aid. Schwegler's book on Montanism
(Tübingen, 1841), Ritschl's on Luke and the Gospel
of Marcion (Tübingen, 1846) and on the origin of
the primitive catholic Church (Bonn, 1850),
Köstlin's on the Johannine system (Berlin, 1843),
were all important; but the most significant was
Schwegler's on the subapostolic age (Tübingen,
1846), which attempted constructive reasoning,
using the writings which had been declared unauthentic as memorials of the development of Judaism
and Paulinism into what came later.

5. Developed by Schwegler.

According to Schwegler, Judaism had no need of
further development; the impulse came from Paulinism, in such a way that the Judaic party
decided, in order to preserve the unity of the Church (Gk. monarchia),
to make some concessions, requiring things of similar import with those demanded by
the pseudadelphoi of the New Testament, but
more easily fulfilled by the Gentiles. If circumcision had to be abandoned, so much the more
weight was laid upon baptism as the Christian

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equivalent; if the works of the Law were
dropped, works were still required; Israel's primacy vanished, but a general aristocratic tendency could be maintained in the episcopate; Paul could not be cast out, but he could be subordinated to Peter. Schwegler then watches this
development and compromise in two places, Rome
and Asia Minor. In Rome he traces the succession
of writings of Judaistic origin thus: first the Shepherd
of Hermas and Hegesippus; then Justin,
the Clementine Homilies, and the Apostolic Constitutions; then James, the Second Epistle of Clement, Mark, the Clementine Recognitions, and II
Peter. On the Pauline side he finds the conciliatory writings to begin under Trajan with I Peter;
then follow Luke and Acts; then the Pastoral
Epistles and the letters of Ignatius. Montanism
being in his view only an offshoot of Judaism, the
Pauline victory falls in the pontificate of Victor
(189-199), under whom Montanism was condemned
at Rome. The Pauline party, indeed, had already
made no slight concessions, in order to ward off
Gnosticism–though the Gnostics and especially the
Marcionites ultimately were of great service to Paulinism in securing the universality of Christianity.

He sees the process as somewhat different in
Asia Minor, where the opponents of Paul rallied,
not as in Rome around Peter, but around John;
here the solution was the formation of a body of
Christian dogma, while in Rome it had been a
unity of organization with a Roman primacy.
While at Rome the supposed Ebionite works are
more numerous than the Pauline, it is the contrary
in Asia Minor; the Apocalypse is here the single
Ebionite memorial, while on the other side Galatians, Colossians, Ephesians, and the Johannine
Gospel form an imposing series of steps in the
development. Bold, however, and fascinating as
are the combinations set forth in this work, and
brilliant as is its execution, it may be pointed out
(though space does not permit of illustration) that
there is scarcely a theologian today who is disposed
to accept this train of reasoning as even an approximately satisfactory solution of the problems suggested. And even in those days, the starting-point
of the whole process of development still remained
to be discussed. It was already obvious that without tracing it back to the person and teaching of
Christ, the question of how the primitive catholic
Church came into existence was insoluble. Attempts in the direction of establishing the entire
critical position by showing a genetic development
of the earliest organization and dogma out of the
gospel of Christ himself marked a third period in
the history of the Tübingen School.

III. The Period of Church History

1. Political Complications.

The political
upheaval of 1848 had its influence on the future of
the school. The attempts made here and there to
introduce its conclusions, under cover of the political movements of the time, into the general life
of the Church could not fail to bring up the question
whether ecclesiastical activity was possible for
adherents of the school. It was answered in the
negative not only by opponents; some of Baur's
own disciples felt that they must either modify
the scientific conclusions they had learned from
him, or seek a secular calling, as Märklin, whose
life was written by Strauss, had done in 1840.
It was not surprising, then, that the German governments thought twice before appointing to academic positions
men whose influence was so disturbing, and that the younger generation
hesitated to follow Baur further, after his most
important disciple, Zeller, was obliged in 1849 to
exchange a theological chair for that of philosophy
at Marburg. Baur felt the isolation in which he
thus began to find himself; but his temperament
allowed him to hold fast longer than others to the
illusion of the identity of church teaching and
Hegelian speculation. He relaxed nothing of his
zeal for the solution of the important problem which
still remained, the establishment on a critical
foundation of a positive story of the development of
Christianity from its origin down through the
centuries.

2. Baur's Works on Church History.

In 1852 Baur published a book (Leipsic) on the
epochs of church history as a preliminary, containing brilliant and frequently sharp criticism
of earlier historians. His own efforts in this direction began with the work
Das Christenthum und die christliche Kirche der drei ersten Jahrhunderte
(Leipsic, 1853), and was continued in Die christliche Kirche vom
Anfang des 4. bis Ausgang des 6. Jahrhunderts (Leipsic, 1859). After
his death appeared (Leipsic, 1861) the third part, completed by himself,
Die christliche Kirche des Mittelalters in den Hauptmomenten ihrer Entwicklung; and
two further volumes were
published from his carefully prepared lecturenotes–Kirchengeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts,
edited by Zeller (Leipsic, 1862), and Kirchengeschichte der neueren Zeit von der Reformation bis
zum Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts, edited by his son Ferdinand (Leipsic, 1863), thus completing the
entire survey.

3. His Theories and Conclusions.

If there is sought in these books an answer to the
question as to the real primitive Christianity which
lay back of Paul and back of Ebionitism, as to the
person of Christ himself, it may be put, once more
substantially in Baur's own words (from the important controversial pamphlet against Uhlhorn,
Die Tübinger Schule und ihre Stellung zur Gegenwart, Leipsic, 1859),
as follows: The real inwardness of Christianity, its essential center point, may
be found in what belongs to the strictly ethical
content of the teaching of Jesus, in the Sermon
on the Mount, the parables, and similar utterances;
in his doctrine of the Kingdom of God and the conditions of membership in it, designed to place
men in the right ethical relation to God. This is the really divine, the
universally human element in it, the part of its content which is eternal and
absolute. What raises Christianity
above all other religions is nothing but the purely
ethical character of its acts, teachings, and requirements. If this is the essential content of the
consciousness of Jesus, it is one of the two factors which
compose his personality; it must have a corresponding form, in order to enter, in the way of

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historical development, into the general consciousness of humanity; and this form is the Jewish
conception of the Messiah, the point of contact
between the mind of Jesus and the world that was
to believe in him, the basis on which alone a religious community destined to broaden into a Church
could be built. We can, therefore, have no clear
and definite conception of the personality of Jesus
if we do not distinguish these two sides of it and
consider them, so to speak, under the aspect of an
antinomy, of a process which develops itself gradually.

4. Their Weakness and Decline.

If we try to get at the heart of Baur's whole
view of the subject, stripping his presentation of
its somewhat pathetic enthusiasm, it will appear
not so very different from Kant's expression, that
the faith of pure reason came in with Christ, indeed,
but was so overlaid in the subsequent history that
if the question were asked which was the best period
in the entire course of church history, it might be
unhesitatingly answered by the choice of the present, in which a nearer approach than ever before is
made to pure religious doctrine. As long as Baur
had gone no further into the really primitive essential import of Christianity than to consider the
Pauline dogmatics as representing it, the development of the Church could perfectly well seem to
him to have proceeded in a wholly rational manner.
The dogmatic and ecclesiastical decisions of the
early ages could, in their context, appear "reasonable," and Baur himself, in contrast
with a writer like Gottfried Arnold or with the unhistoric rationalism,
almost an orthodox historian, always in harmony with the course of events
as it proceeded. Not only Athanasius and Augustine, but Gregory VII and Innocent III had full
justice at his hands. But this involved an equally
tolerant acknowledgment of the claims of the nineteenth century. If the humanitarianism of Goethe
and Schiller seemed better adapted to the needs of
educated men in this age than the Church in its
older form, here also the living must take precedence; and suddenly the place of the old Church
was taken by a broad "communion" in which all
the heroes of the intellect, even the most modern,
took their place as saints. But when the question
came to be asked what this prevalent humanism
had in common with ancient Christianity, it became
apparent that the whole long process of development was really a totally unnecessary
détour, whose purpose it was difficult to discover. It
could scarcely be denied that a historical method
which saw the essence of Christianity in ethics
exclusively, which knew nothing of the need of
redemption, and which was unable to give any
positive account of the person of Christ, was one
in which the Hegelian conception of development
practically disappeared. Yet the distinguishing
mark of the school of Baur had been the application
of this very conception to Christian history, especially that of the primitive age–the attempt to
show the course of history as rational and necessary;
and thus, in the person of its head, the Tübingen
School deserted the fundamental principle which
in its palmy days it had sought to enforce. It
was, then, not surprising that uncertainty showed
itself among the members of the school on the
question of the Gospels. The less a definite tendency could be proved in the synoptics, the more
they were shown to offer at least a substratum of
purely historical matter, so much the more pressing
became the question how the school's view of history could be reconciled with the actual course of
events. When the attempt to construct the latter
a priori, failed, an advantage was given to the
"literary-historical" method with which Hilgenfeld undertook to replace the criticism of tendency.
In his Historisch-kritische Einleitung in das neue Testament (Leipsic, 1875) the Tübingen views were
modified in a large number of points. Thus the
results supposed to have been attained by the
"objective criticism" of Baur were called in question by his own fellow workers; and when he died,
it is hardly too much to say that his school, at least
in the narrower sense, died with him.